Congratulations to Maca, who's just bought himself some digs. Fair dues to him, and I mean that. But never let me pass over an opportunity to poo on someone's parade. So here goes…
Maca says that they bought the house because "we figure we’re better off paying our mortgage than someone else’s mortgage." Is this true in the present climate? Is the property ladder the place to be when it's really a snake?
The way I figure it, putting aside all those intangible joys like trips to Ikea etc, the 'am I better off paying my own mortgage?' calculation ought to proceed according to the maxim that the fall in property prices minus the amount paid off the principal on the mortgage ought not be greater than the outlay in rent (by the way, I had this expressed in an equation a couple of minutes ago but decided that I'd never be invited to dinner parties again if I posted it. Truly I am a sad, sad person).
So, if the amount you spend on your rent is more than a fall in value of your house minus the amount you pay onto the principal on the mortgage then buy. If not, then rent. Or, to take an example: in the first year of a mortgage, assuming an average priced €300,000 house at 5.4% APR, you will only pay about €4,200 off the principal (and €16,000 odd in interest). In that time in 2008, the house will have fallen in value by €24,000 (about 8% according to Goodbody). So the purchase of a house is worthwhile if you would otherwise fork out €19,600 in rent in the year. That's €1,633 a month. Of course, you could buy a cheaper house. It's also not unlikely, if you are renting a house, that this calculation might work in favour of buying (well, that or renting somewhere smaller). On the other hand, you could be saddled with a higher interest rate on your mortgage than I've allowed for here. Either way, what is undoubtedly true is that part of the value of the house will simply disappear into thin air in 2008/9. And lots of the mortgage will go toward the upkeep of the bank's shareholders, not towards the principal on the loan.
In which case it's not unlikely that renting until prices bottom out would be better overall than paying one's own mortgage. Let someone else suffer the loss in wealth and then jump onto the ladder. Or at least that it's not automatically the case that you are better off paying your own mortgage from 2008 than you would be leaving it until 2010.
Great news for all potential flat dwellers if all new minimum standards for rented accommodation listed in today’s Irish Times are realised. It does come as a bit of a surprise, however, that these new standards are an enhanced version of standards issued fifteen years ago. It’s the first that I and possibly most other students of the Nineties have heard of it.
My own Dublin flat renting lasted for a period of around 10 years and the hallmark of practically all dwellings was that they were dilapidated. What’s more, we queued for the privilege. On one occasion, I was fortunate enough to spot an ad in Irish in the evening paper for bedsits off the South Circular Road. There was still a sizeable queue. The best thing about one particular bedsit was that the water immersion tank was in a cupboard in my room, so whenever the meter was cranked up a bit of extra heat was generated. This was needed, given the cracks in both windows and the hole in the ceiling. In another, the landlord reliably informed me that the heavy creatures I could hear hurtling alongside the water pipes at night were simply little field mice coming in from the cold! Family members have had equally insane experiences; one person cooked out of a cupboard for two years, another had a chipboard structure cum bathroom bang in the middle of her only room. I have often wondered since why we weren’t even half tempted to complain. The reality of the situation was that there was very little choice until the late Nineties; it was squalor or nothing on a tight budget.
As students, we at least had the hope that one day the standard of our accomodation would move on to another level. However, for a large number of Irish people on low wages and newly arrived immigrants, there is no such reality in the Ireland of today. Furthermore, while the sub-standard dwellings of the nineteen nineties were reasonably cheap (stangely enough, given the demand), today’s newspapers and online ads carry hefty rents for addresses which are still, patently, as run-down as ever.
So, here’s hoping that in the very near future all rented bathrooms will be “provided in a room separate from other rooms by a wall and door and containing separate ventilation”, that heating will consist of “fixed appliances capable of providing effective heating and proper ventilation”, and that the facade and common areas of rented accomodation will “be clean and well maintained”. If not, let’s hope the flat dwellers of today are more aware of their rights and less afraid of pursuing them.
Atom Egoyan's haunting stage production of Samuel Beckett's television play Eh Joe was one of the most striking elements of the Beckett centenary at the Gate Theatre in Dublin a couple of years ago. Well, it seems it's been brought to New York , with Liam Neeson as Joe (Joe was played by Michael Gambon in Dublin and London). You can get a small sense of the play on this New York Times slide show, but if you're in NYC you really ought to go along and see it on its own or preferably as part of a package.
There's more from Michael O'Driscoll in today's Irish Times letter's page. He has come back with the same irrelevant claims he made last time and the usual bizarre notion that a move from discrimination to equality is a zero-zum game. Still, fair dues to him for answering the claim that he hadn't provided evidence on his claims that homosexuality leads to greater levels of domestic violence and the like. He does answer it in this letter, though not in his own words. His research, it seems is based on a series of studies, misquoted with abandon all over the right-wing internet (including in this wonderful brief (pdf) from United Families International).
Of course I wouldn't for the life of me suggest that O'Driscoll is himself doing the misquoting. For instance, he says that
The homosexual authors of Men Who Beat The Men Who Love Them also claimed that domestic violence affected half of all gay couples.
Strange: I've looked and the book says absolutely nothing of the sort. It does engage in some surmising about domestic violence rates but not actual measurement. How can O'Driscoll be so confused? Maybe he hit on this site (a Canadian pro-life outfit by the looks of things) which lifts, with permission, a 2004 article that states that
According to the homosexual authors of Men Who Beat The Men Who Love Them, domestic violence affects half of all gay couples.
Interesting. Is this the first ever cogging of a misquote of a misrepresentation in the Irish Times? I don't know.
O'Driscoll goes on to say that
The leading US gay magazine The Advocate reported that 75 per cent of its readers admitted engaging in violent sex, with a further 20 per cent engaging in sadistic sex.
LifeSite has:
According to the leading US gay magazine The Advocate, 75% of its readers admit engaging in violent sex, 20% in sadistic sex and 55% are using painful objects.
Presumably the painful objects stuff wasn't deemed suitable for the Irish Times, nor was the idea that sex can be consensual and violent, weird etc. Sadly I can't find the study for our edification. Nor do I know who reads The Advocate and, as a result, who is available to respond to surveys of its readers.
Earlier on in the paragraph, LifeSite had made the very interesting point that:
A study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence examined conflict and violence in lesbian relationships. The researchers found that 90% of the lesbians surveyed had been recipients of one or more acts of verbal aggression from their intimate partners during the year prior to this study, with 31% reporting one or more incidents of physical abuse.
O'Driscoll says:
A study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence examining conflict in lesbian relationships discovered that a third of those surveyed had experienced one or more incidents of physical abuse
All credit for making the work more concise. Sadly, the QUB server is down so I can't find the Journal of Interpersonal Violence article to confirm what it says but I certainly get a sense that veracity isn't the primary motivation here.
Update: the QUB site is still down (and I suspect that we don't subscribe to the journal) but here's an extended abstract. Strictly speaking the third-of-those-surveyed number is true, but those surveyed were 284 respondents at a women's music festival in 1989, so we're not talking hugely representative at the get-go. And there's an in-built bias here anyway: who do you think is more inclined to respond to questionnaires on domestic violence? People with experience of domestic violence perhaps? Moreover, the markers for physical violence are very wide: shoving, grabbing, basically any physical touch borne from aggression. I would hazard a guess that the numbers are the same for heterosexual relationships. Tragically high in both cases, but it's unlikely that gay relationships are special on this front (all real evidence suggests that violence rates are more or less the same).(/Update)
By the way, O'Driscoll isn't simply lifting from this or some related article. He also says that
studies such as 'Violence Between Intimates,' published by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics in November 1994, indicate that violence is two to three times more common among homosexual partners than among married couples.
The "violence among homosexual partners…" phrase is also used, with reference to page 2 of Violence Between Intimates (scroll down for the pdf) on this page on the American College of Pediatricians website. Don't be fazed by the high-falutin name: the ACP is a conservative advocacy group, not a professional association. Anyway, I can't for the life of me find any reference to homosexual violence in Violence Between Intimates at all. So this isn't even a misrepresentation that I can see – it's pure fiction.
Still, apart from his moral energy not extending to his passing the misleading claims of others in the conservative echo chamber as his own and apart from the fact that it's hard to believe he's primarily motivated by concern for the well-being of homosexuals, I regard O'Driscoll's letter as a good news story. He is obviously inadvertantly bullshitting us (since I assume he has sought out sites where it will be easy for him to believe that what they tell him is true) but he is also acknowledging that decisions about public policy ought to be made on the basis of evidence. What a pity that Irish civic society is just as amenable to clever-sounding misinformation as anywhere else
There's a good interview with John Fingleton in today's Times. I think Fingleton lectured me when I was an economics undergrad, before he moved on to the Competition Authority. He always seemed like a very nice guy. Anyway, he's now chief executive of the UK's Office of Fair Trading and is doing an excellent job to my mind.
The best line in the interview has him reflecting on his relative anonymity, where most people seem to think that the OFT has something to do with coffee:
'It was the same when I was in Ireland at the Competition Authority,' he says. 'We had schools writing in asking what competitions we were organising.'
The post-industrial age brings a new kind of camp follower I suppose. Gone are the families, farmers and prostitutes. Now the hangers on are telecoms engineers. Well, I suppose Libertas at least had the tactical nous to leave the fight for Irish neutrality to the people with a private army (yes: my sulk continues…).
I had a mentor who said to me once that the fact that straw men exist is no reason to waste time on them. Wise words indeed when it comes to academic writing. With blogging on the other hand, it can be fun. So it goes with this profoundly daft letter to today's Irish Times. One Michael O'Driscoll of Cork manages to be wrong on all the facts and illogical by his own mistaken premises. What an achievement. At the risk of being accused of liberal intolerance (still, to the best of my knowledge, liberals only need to be happy to suffer fools, not to indulge them) I think this merits some sort of response.
Now, it is indeed the case that some of what O'Driscoll has to say simply doesn't merit a response. He seems to suggest that the value of marriage lies in its being exclusive. After all, "everything is special, then nothing is." Perhaps the world is full of people who share some sort of Shmittian view of marriage, where it's the doors that make the club, but I don't think I'm particularly perverse in valuing my marriage for the relationship it formalises, not the fact that I have goodies them gays can't have.
Such nonsense aside, I'm fascinated by O'Driscoll's claim that "there is a substantial body of evidence, however, which indicates that
same-sex unions are far more prone to dissolution than heterosexual marital unions. They also experience higher rates of violence, mental
and even physical illness." Really? I can tell you now that no such evidence exists. Taking dissolution alone (because I'm not so sad as to address all this crap), there is in fact very little evidence on this matter and what evidence does exist seems to point at quite the opposite conclusion.1 That is, that predictors of relationship dissolution work in quite the same way for straight and gay couples alike. As Kurdeck found in his limited study, "there is no evidence that gay partners and lesbian partners were psychologically maladjusted, that they had high levels of personality traits that predisposed them to relationship problems, that they had dysfunctional working models of their relationships, and that they used ineffective strategies to resolve conflict. The only area in which gay and lesbian partners fared worse than heterosexual parents was in the area of social support: Gay partners and lesbian partners received less support for their relationships from family members than heterosexual parents did" (p. 896).
Which brings me on to the question of why there isn't much research on this sort of area. There are two main reasons (I'm sure there's more), all of which expose the problem with the thinking behind this letter.
First, it's impossible to compare like with like. It's more or less established that the formal and informal benefits conferred by marriage act as constraints on unhappy individuals leaving relationships. As King and Bartlett have it here, "civil unions will have important legal, social, and financial implications and take place within a defined social ritual." If the institution was available to same sex couples it would "probably increase societal and family support for same sex couples and enable them to resolve difficulties that inevitably arise rather than simply leave a relationship." So, there's two ways of looking at this, both of which might carry weight. First, if gay relationships are less stable it might be because of the lack of social support, not the lack of commitment. Second, if a proper comparison is to be carried out, it would have to be between all relationships, gay and straight, not gay relationships and marriage.
Second, there is no such thing as a catch-all gay relationship. Indeed, there's no such thing as a catch-all straight relationship. Relationships are driven, surprise surprise by gender differences, for instance. Moreover, there's no reason to expect the type of relationship O'Driscoll wants to exclude to conform to the type of relationship O'Driscoll wants to extoll. It's likely that both are a product more of his fevered imagination than any actual lived experience. Whatever, it's very hard to study two categories of relationship that only exist as ideal types.
It should also be said that any greater levels of psychological ailments among gay people are unlikely to be a result of gay people's spending time with people that they love and that love them. It seems more likely that such ailments are a function of gay people being forced to spend time with, or hiding from, people that hate them or, you know, that belittle and condemn gay people and their relationships.
But let's not stop there. This Bill O'Driscoll is talking about is a Civil Partnership Bill. It's a licence that extends some tax and inheritance benefits of marriage to people in long-term relationships. It's not marriage. If O'Driscoll wants a priest to tell him he's terribly special then he's perfectly welcome to. For the rest of us all we want is a spot of social recognition and support and not to have to pay inheritance duties on houses we buy together. Why we have to be into members of the opposite sex in order to avail of that privilege is a mystery to me. Moreover, and here's the militant gay liberal bit, even if 99.99% of gay people spent half their lives doing things that would make Caligula weep (the stuff that homophobes seem so fixated on) and the other half weeping and wailing and even if 99% of gay people couldn't hold a relationship down, all that is no reason why the .01% in this imaginary scenario shouldn't avail of relationship-based tax breaks. As it happens, numbers of gay people in relationships aren't vastly short of the numbers for straight people but that's irrelevant in a society that enshrines the equality of individuals.
All that O'Driscoll is left with is that straight people sex makes babies. Indeed and it does. If that is what he values he should be arguing for tax breaks for family units that include children, not for married couples.
Anyway, that's enough for now. I really ought not read the Irish Times letters page. Here's Russell Brand on other letter writers:
1. Herek, 'Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Relationships in the United States: A Social Science Perspective' American Psychologist 2006 (see here (pdf)): "Research on the stability and duration of same-sex relationships is limited, but data from convenience samples show that long-lasting relationships are common (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Kurdek, 2004). Moreover, the one published study in this area that examined factors leading to relationship on dissolution found that a decline in relationship quality predicted dissolution of same-sex and heterosexual relationships alike (Kurdeck, 2004)."
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